


Geslorp’s House of Terrors

by AmnesiaticRoses



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Voltron Halloween Fic Fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-26 06:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12550800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmnesiaticRoses/pseuds/AmnesiaticRoses
Summary: Lance is excited when Hunk agrees to visit a carnival-style space haunted house with him. The haunted house should be fun, and Hunk's reactions should be funny.But Lance forgot to account for the power of technological curiosity...





	Geslorp’s House of Terrors

**Author's Note:**

> For the Voltron Halloween Fic Fest! And thanks to enabling by Musa_Nocturna.
> 
> This is just a bit of a mess, but I hope you enjoy! Unbetaed, so please feel free to point out any mistakes that need fixing. As always, I don't own the characters or the world.

“Ta-da!” Lance gestured to the building and beamed.

Hunk stared at it for a moment. “It’s a… haunted house.”

“Yeah!” Lance seemed immensely pleased with himself.  

“A haunted house,” Hunk repeated.

“Yes.” Lance’s voice lost some of the enthusiasm. “It’s a haunted house. You figured it out. Excellent job.”

Hunk ruffled a hand through his hair, trying to work out the right way to word this. After a few seconds, he settled on, “But… why?"

“I don’t know, because they thought it would be fun to make one?”

“No, no, I mean… why am I here, at a haunted house, with you?” Hunk clarified, gesturing to the building with both hands. “Come on Lance, we finally have a little bit of down time. I thought you said we were going to do something _fun_.”

“This _is_ going to be fun!” Lance protested.

Hunk felt skeptical. No offense to the folks who’d made this place, but didn’t paladins of Voltron see enough scary things without intentionally inflicting more upon themselves? He stared over, past a ticket booth and the short line of patrons, to the building itself.

It didn’t look like the sort of haunted houses he’d seen in Earth -- neither the old derelict wooden buildings full of cobwebs not the more campy-looking pop-up ones that carnivals tended to have. Instead, it looked like a sand castle, but not the sort you sculpted with buckets and shovels. This was the sort of sand castle where you let wet sand dribble and drop between your fingers into uneven, tumorous towers and walls. No two dimensions of the gray-and-black-stone building before them seemed right, or even. The interior had to be a nightmare of irregularity.

A shudder ran down Hunk’s spine.

He glanced over to Lance again, about to ask how much he had his heart set on this idea, only to find Lance wearing a smile that Hunk had long since learned not to trust.

“What are you grinning about?” Hunk asked, eyes narrowing.

“Just excited to go inside,” Lance said, unconvincingly. “Come on, it took ages to find this place, and I don’t want to go by myself. How boring would that be?”

Hunk’s eyes narrowed further as he stared into his friend’s face, looking for more obvious signs of deception. Then he sighed and hung his head.

“Fine. Fine, if you’re set on this, then let’s just… just get it over with.”

“Yes!” Man, Lance seemed _way_ too excited about this. The two of them got in line at the little outbuilding to purchase their tickets. As they waited, Hunk glanced over at the list of rules. _If you cause damage to the premises you may be asked to leave. Beings with limited ambulatory or other motor limitations may want to check with the caretaker before entry, as some areas may not be suitable for them. Beings must be able to fit through the first door in order to visit Geslorp’s House of Terrors. Those who cannot will receive a refund. Beings whose physical well-being can be jeopardized by high-stress situations should refrain from entering Geslorp’s House of Terrors. Those who-_

He blinked. “Lance, I don’t think I can go in here.”

“What are you talking about?” Lance asked. He wasn’t looking at the sign, opting to scope out the haunted house itself while they waited.

Hunk pointed. “I don’t know about _you_ , but high-stress situations are definitely bad for _my_ health.”

With a little laugh, Lance said, “Naw, that’s just the space version of how back home, they’d say not to ride if you had heart problems. Not just if you don’t like to get out of your comfort zone.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m almost always out of my comfort zone out here,” Hunk muttered, but he purchased his ticket without a further mention of stress and joined Lance in the short line leading to the entrance..

Up close, he could see the details of Geslorp’s House of Terrors with unfortunate clarity. A few windows were nearly covered with what looked like old, thick ropes, with bits of fraying thread hanging off them. These nearly blocked out the interior lights - mostly in shades of purple and blue, sometimes crossed by shadows whose form he couldn’t begin to make out. A faint musty scent, like an old, unused closet, hung on the air. The building was eerily silent, with the only sounds coming from it an occasional clacking, skittering sound alllllmost too quiet to hear. It put Hunk in mind of an oversized bug moving around just out of sight. Perhaps out of respect, or fear, this led to the beings in line speaking in hushed tones.

As they waited, Hunk muttered, “So, you’re sure aliens think of haunted houses the same way we do, right? Like… you’re sure we won’t actually get eaten if we go in there, right? Because it’s awfully quiet…”

Lance snorted a laugh. “Right, how would a place like this stay open if they ate their customers?” Lance asked. Fair point, but Hunk couldn’t help but notice that after saying it, Lance turned back to the building and the smile faded a little.

“You _aren’t_ sure!” he hissed, rounding on his friend.

“OK! OK, I’m not a hundred percent certain, but it wouldn’t make sense for this to be anything but-”

Hunk was torn between ranting and just taking a second to gather his thoughts. Ranting won out. “Make sense?” He was trying to shout and whisper at the same time. “Lance, this isn’t Earth! Who knows what might make sense for here? Maybe paying to get eaten by some giant monster is a fun Tuesday night for some species!”

Lance watched him, used to this sort of thing and clearly unimpressed by the argument. “You are just a worrywart,” he informed Hunk once he was sure he’d finished for the moment.

“ _Someone_ has to be!” Hunk started, but before he could get any further, a bored voice from behind him broke in.

“Are you coming in or…”

Hunk turned. The rest of the line had disappeared inside, and a bored-looking three-eyed orange alien with its hair flopping messily down over its face was staring in their general direction, positively radiating boredom.

“We-” Hunk started, but this time got cut off by his teammate brushing past him.

“Yes, we are,” Lance said, sidling up to the alien and handing it his ticket. Then he turned, grinning at Hunk over his shoulder and repeated, “Worrywart” before stepping through the door and out of sight.

“Lance!” Hunk hissed in frustration, hurrying after him and pressing his ticket into the alien’s hands as he passed. Was this his life? This was his life. Lance making poorly thought out decisions and Hunk following him because one of these days, one of these decisions was going to be _really_ bad, and who was Lance going to need when that happened? And after all the past bad ideas, he still just didn’t _think_!

Thus grumbling to himself, Hunk stepped up to the door. It was painted an inky black, so dark it looked like a void rather than a door. But as he stepped up to it, a brilliant magenta light slashed down the middle and the door split, each half sliding into the wall to admit him into-

Another void. _Great_.

Hunk groped forward three steps, then stopped as the door closed behind him and left him in complete darkness. “Lance?” He said in a low voice. The silence was even more profound in here. It was like being in space, but if all the stars had gone out and everything had fallen still and dead. Just imagining it gave him another little shiver.

That’s when he felt something cool latch onto his wrist.

Hunk jumped a foot, yanking his arm free and stumbling a couple steps back. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod… Lance?!”

Familiar laughter floated through the darkness. “I wish I could have seen your face,” Lance said. Then, after a few seconds, “or anything. It’s REALLY dark in here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is,” Hunk snapped in the general direction of Lance’s voice. “Just perfect in case someone’s sneaking up on us right now. You know there are species that can see in really dim light, maybe on this planet they’re able to see in complete… pitch black… inky…” he trailed off. The silence settled in again. But not total silence.

Footsteps.

Coming closer.

To his left, he heard a rustling of cloth as Lance moved closer, and he mirrored the movement. The footsteps were coming closer… closer…

A light suddenly flared, replacing the dark with a blinding brilliance. Hunk shielded his eyes against the lights and shrieked -- then did it again when his eyes adjusted a little and he was able to make out three deep-sunken eyes, the light casting them into wells of shadow and making the four rows of pointy teeth in its open mouth seem to stretch and move.

“Hey.”

Hunk quieted and dropped his hands slightly, a little puzzled at this decidedly violence-free introduction. In the new light, he could see that Lance seemed to have flinched back from it as well.

“Uh. Hey,” Lance said, sounding completely wrongfooted.

“You two really need to keep going,” it said, as though their decision to move or not could not have interested it less. “We can’t let more people in until you clear the entrance portal.” The creature squinted at them, and Hunk was finally able to place it. The ticket taker. It was only the ticket taker. Hunk sagged a little as tension sapped out of his muscles.

“Yeah. Sorry.” Lance still sounded uneasy, but in the light from the flashlight they could see not only the black curtains the ticket-taker was peeking through, but the way they needed to go and started walking again, leaving the ticket taker behind. The pair moved in silence for a while, hands on the walls so they could navigate the irregular turns, until a pale red glow started filtering toward them from somewhere up ahead.

As the light intensified, Lance -- who was leading -- turned his head slightly and whispered, “So, was it just me or was that guy popping out of the wall probably scarier than anything else in this place?”

“We haven’t _seen_ anything else in this place,” Hunk said. He wasn’t willing to make any bets. If he’d learned one thing, it was _things can always get worse_.

They came around a final corner to find the red light spilling from what looked like a full moon, set near the ceiling. The room they’d entered was large, perhaps the size of the training room in the castle, and it was pocked with huge spires of slate-gray stone. A frigid breeze swirled around them, raising goosebumps along the back of Hunk’s arms.

The two of them stopped a few paces in, just trying to take in the unexpected space. Or at least, that was what had Hunk on edge. The building hadn’t been this big! He squinted around. How had they done this? Was there some sort of teleporter in the hall? Maybe there’d been an incline as they were walking, and the majority of the haunted house was underground? But he hadn’t felt like they were on a hill, and they hadn’t walked that far, it would have had to be pretty steep…

“What was that?”

Lance’s question dragged Hunk’s attention out of the technical realm and into the regular one. Now that he listened, there was a sound -- a scuffing, as if someone were trying to move quietly among the stones but had slipped up.

_Or wanted you to hear._

He scanned the room again, looking for something different this time. “Uh… Lance?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you see an exit?”

A pause. Then, “There has to be an exit.”

“Not if we’re supposed to get eaten.” Hunk amazed himself with how calmly he got that out, considering that not only did he not see an exit, it seemed the way they’d come into this room had also disappeared. Great. Juuuust great. It made the ticket taker’s reference to “entrance portal” take on a whole new meaning.

Lance laughed, but the sound was forced. “We are _not_ here to get eaten,” he said. “Come on, let’s look around. We don’t want to get yelled at again for taking too long.”

They both started walking around the room to the right, studying the walls. They’d been painted jet black like the corridor and the door before, again giving the impression of a void. Hunk put a hand out, fingers splayed on the surface, just to reassure himself that they _were_ walls. And as they walked, he absolutely, definitely did not hear feathery footsteps shadowing their every move. And he certainly wasn’t starting to walk faster, little by little.

Up ahead, Lance was checking the cleft between two of the craggy spires. “You know, I’m starting to think there really isn’t an exit.” As Hunk caught up to him, Lance turned and braced a hand against one of the rocks. His eyes darted around, and he was trying to look nonchalant, but he seemed poised for flight.

Hunk looked around the cleft. It seemed to be near where they’d started, though without the actual entrance to judge by, he couldn’t be absolutely sure. If there _was_ an exit, it wasn’t in the wall. “Well, great. Just great. What do we do now? Pound on the wall and ask the ticket alien to let us out?”

A low growl answered from behind him. They both froze. Hunk moved his eyes to look at Lance’s face. Lance, eyes terribly wide, stared at something behind him.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.” He seemed to be trying to speak without moving his mouth. “Have we seen any aliens so far that look like a spider and a wolf spent a _really_ wild night together and then grew some extra fangs?”

Oh god, he did not need that visual in his head. “What do we do?” His whisper was barely audible.

“We run?” Lance suggested, his eyes unblinking.

“When? Now?”

“Run!”

It was a shout this time, then they were both moving, Hunk driven by the tension that had every muscle once more wound like a spring. He and Lance split as they cleared the dead end they’d been exploring, Lance to the right and he to the left. As they did, Hunk got one terrifyingly clear look at the thing after them - no spider, this thing had at least ten legs, but the rest of the description had been accurate.

Back on Earth, Hunk had sometimes played video games with Lance, and there was something Lance occasionally did on fighting games on his computer where he would take the skin of one character and apply it to another. The results were sometimes comedic, sometimes grotesque as the game tried to stretch or scrunch the skin onto a new size frame and new set of animations.

That was all Hunk could think of, looking at the monstrosity. The wolfish head was recognizable but wrong - too bulbous, with far too large a mouth full of far too many teeth. The furred body looked bloated, before sprouting into myriad legs with huge, hook-like claws protruding from them. He was sure there were at least ten, but he didn’t take the time to count precisely.

A small, unreasonably calm part of his mind wondered if it had a tail. The rest of him focused on the running.

It didn’t take long for Hunk to realize that when they’d split up, the monster had followed Lance. He could hear them from where he’d ducked into the lee of a rock spire. Lance was not exactly being quiet, and the creature’s many feet beat a terrifying staccato on the ground as it gave chase. “It’s not real, we’re not going to get eaten, it’s not real,” Hunk muttered to himself like a prayer as he peered around his hiding place. Real or not, they would need to find a way out, and quick.

The shouting got louder, then Lance came sprinting by Hunk’s hiding place. “Huuuunk!” he shrilled. On instinct, Hunk started forward a couple steps to help before his brain could actually process the move.

The creature came to a halt, then picked its way around to face Hunk. The mouth gaped open. Something wet matted the fur of its lower jaw -- could have been saliva or venom, but Hunk only glanced past it to the teeth crowding the maw, each as long as his pointer finger. Then it was his turn to join the chase.

“This is messed up!” he shouted as he rounded one of the spires, putting a hand out and using it to turn sharper. The creature bayed, close on his heels. “Lance, you see the exit? Please please please see the exit!”

“I’m looking!” came the reply from somewhere on his left. Hunk curved a little to the right and the beast followed, howling. He felt sure he could feel its breath on his neck, expected one of those horrible legs to strike out at him at any moment, but it seemed to stay just at his heels, as though he were just baaaarely managing to keep out of its reach.

Except… wait.

Hunk was under no illusions about his physical fitness. Oh, he was fit, sure, but not in the same way as some of his teammates. If the thing had been nipping at quick, agile Lance’s heels, this shouldn’t even be a contest. But somehow, the monster was... he checked over his shoulder, caught another good look at those jaws and let out an involuntary shout as he turned away again… yeah, it was basically just as far behind him as it had been behind Lance. Not that he was complaining, but it should be fast enough to catch him, especially as he turned, right? So why…  
  
It was then that Hunk made a likely-very-stupid decision. He turned into a relatively open space, and about halfway along, he slid to a halt and turned, bracing himself with his head down and his eyes closed. _It’snotrealit’snotrealit’snotreal…_

If he was wrong, this was REALLY going to hurt.

The feet pounded up. He flinched.

Nothing happened.

Hunk cracked one eye open. Stared at the ground. No blood. So, not insta-killed. That was good. Slowly, he turned his head a little.

The monster crouched about three feet away, slobbering and growling. Its legs pawed and tapped at the ground. When it saw him watching, it made a little lunge, making Hunk flinch back involuntarily again, but he held his ground. Slowly, he straightened up and looked at the thing with both eyes.

It stared back, seemingly at a loss.

“Ha ha! Oh man, am I glad you didn’t eat me,” Hunk said, advancing a step. “So, what are you huh, creepy monster thing?” He held out a hand in a friendly gesture, but the thing took a step away, still slavering. “No, yeah, I get it, you can’t break character. But-” He glanced down to see one of the feet come down a little too close to a nearby spire and clip into it, just a little.

Hunk finally smiled. “Oooh. A hologram? Or maybe-”

“Hunk?” Lance’s voice floated to him from across the room. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

Instantly, the creature’s head oriented on the direction of the sound. With a howl, it bounded off. For a second, Hunk just admired it. It was some sort of intangible construct -- hologram was still his guess -- but it was not only complicated on a basic design level, but also on an implementation level. The thing was reacting to them and the environment on the fly. The sheer number of sensors that would take given the terrain in here… unless the beast’s body did have a physical portion somewhere in the center, holding the sensors, and that item just built the hologram around itself? Man, if only Pidge were here, she would probably have-

The sound of a scream dragged his mind back to the situation. Oh yeah. Lance. “Coming, Lance!” he shouted, but jogging not toward the sound, but toward the center of the room.

They needed an exit. Looking around the edges hadn’t given them an answer, but that made sense, right? The edges were easier. Safer. This was _Geslorp’s House of Terrors_ , where the very first thing they dump on you is a really incredible holographic monster that chases you around. It wants to _scare_ you. And where would be the scariest place to go?

In the center of the room, several of the stone spires clustered together, forming a small clearing and a jagged cave. There was only one way in and out.Thick ropes of what was clearly supposed to be spider web stretched across the space, making getting into or even seeing into the cave difficult. Realistic-looking bones and chunks of meat lay strewn around the ground. Hunk forged on, shoving sticky ropes of webbing out of the way and peering into the cave.

The space beyond held more bones, a whole lot of darkness… and a trap door.

“Lance! I found it!” he shouted as loudly as he could. “The exit! This way!”

Not ten seconds later, Lance came tearing around a corner and into the spider’s den. Hunk pulled aside several of the lowest-hanging strands, then followed Lance into the cave, watching anxiously as Lance disappeared down the trapdoor before following him with a bit of haste.

It might be a hologram, Hunk thought as he got one last, uncomfortably close look at those slimy, overly toothy jaws, but it was a very _good_ hologram.

The trapdoor led to a low, dimly lit tunnel that forced both of them to stoop a little. Lance collapsed against the wall, staring back up at the trapdoor for a moment, chest heaving. Then he started laughing.

“Oh my god, did you _see_ that thing?” There was almost a giddiness in Lance’s voice. “Do you suppose it’s real, or did they just make it up?”

“I hope they made it up,” Hunk said, meaning every word of it. He considered following that up by explaining what he thought the creature had been, from a technical standpoint. But… no. After all, hadn’t Lance wanted to come here to get scared? It might be kind of a jerk move to undercut that for him.

His decisions had nothing at all to do with the fact that Lance looked like he’d expected at least part of the enjoyment of this place to be watching Hunk freak out. Nothing at all.

Once the both of them had caught their breath, they proceeded down the hallway. It was dark again, but this time the distant glow was blue, giving everything a vaguely unreal quality. The pair of them set a pretty quick pace, making a couple corners and finally finding the source of the light.

The previous room had a sort of naturalistic feel, but this one was all manufactured. The walls and floor were covered with what might have been white tile before all the grime and drying blood in a rainbow of colors had gotten to them. A single bright light shone down on a hovering gurney, itself covered in a cloth so dirty that Hunk suspected it would hold its shape if moved. An equally stained blue smock hung on a coat rack near the head of the gurney.

In one corner sat an enormous, rusting sink, water dripping into it in an irregular pattern, while the oversized cupboard or refrigerator next to it looked like some sort of fungal colony was trying to escape from within. Shelves, wide and deep, stood covered in a variety of instruments Hunk could not even begin to guess at the purpose of… well, _generally_ speaking he could given the foul-medicine feel this room was evoking, but without knowing the intended biology of the target, not _specifically_ …

Hunk felt a brushing at his elbow and turned to see Lance staring, transfixed, at the tableau. “H… Hunk? Is… is that-”

Hunk looked back to the setup to see that what he’d taken for a smock hanging on a coatrack was, in fact, a smock being worn by a theatrically horrific creature. It had had its back to them at first, but now it had begun a slow turn, as though the muscles within it weren’t working correctly. Its freakishly long arms hung nearly to where its knees would be, if it had knees.

Its eyes fastened on them… er, eye. It had space for two, but one of them had gone missing, leaving a gaping hole rimmed with a truly putrid green pus. Stretches of skin on the face had rotted away as well, exposing muscle and teeth, and chunks of the scalp had fallen loose. The creature grinned liplessly. Hunk watched, a little grossed out but mostly just fascinated. Was the thing a shape shifter? Or maybe this was a mask… or really good prosthetics and makeup?

“Ahhhh. New patients? Welcome.”

The “doctor’s” too-wide mouth moved a little too much as it spoke. But Hunk lost interest pretty quickly. As the creature had moved, the gurney came into full view behind it.

Whatever it was looked like it had been a full being at some point, but excessive work from the star of this room had reduced it to a mess of glistening innards, arranged in horrifyingly artistic piles and heaps. A pale green face stared in a daze out of the mess. In the quiet of the room, he could hear the thing’s breath rasping in and out, could see some sort of lung-like organ inflating and deflating on the corner of the gurney, well distant from where he assumed it should be.

Hunk took a small step forward, reminding the queasy part of himself _it’s not real_. Since he knew what he was looking for, the motion enabled him to catch a slight ripple in the empty space underneath that horrifying surface. Small-scale, imperfect cloaking. That also explained how the head of the creature seemed to be at such an odd angle. They hid it within folds of stained cloth, but clearly the thing was sitting under the gurney with its head poking through, and cloaking hid the rest of it from view. The whole thing was meticulously crafted for a near-perfect illusion.

The “doctor,” perhaps noting Hunk’s fairly quick dismissal of its own appearance, had focused on Lance, sidling up to him with a wicked looking knife in one hand. “So, it’s you first then?” It asked with another unnaturally wide grin.

“Uhhh, yes. Wait, no! No thanks, we’re just passing through,” Lance said with a nervous laugh, taking a side-step away from the thing, eyes flitting uncertainly between the face and the knife. “Let’s see, there’s got to be an exit…”

Hearing this, Hunk tore his attention away from the macabre work of art and scanned the room more generally, letting his eyes skim the details. Once more the door they’d entered by had disappeared - an interesting effect, and one with a number of ways to accomplish it. His mind chewed over a few of them as he continued studying the room. No, no windows, no doors. Well, if this was anything like last time…

He walked across the room toward the fridge, stepping around the “Doctor” with a pleasant “Excuse me.” The creature just watched him go, knife slack in its grip. Hunk walked up to the cupboard/fridge and pulled it open.

Immediately he gagged. A wave of dank and musty air surrounded him from within, and the walls and ceiling of the interior were fuzzy with disgustingly realistic molds. Still, there was definitely a walkway extending into the darkness. “Gh… in… in here,” he choked out, looking back over his shoulder and taking another, cleaner breath. Toward the middle of the room, Lance was working his way slowly around the “doctor” while trying not to turn his back on it. Hunk moved out of the way and held the door open, letting Lance slip through first before giving an apologetic shrug to the “doctor” and its patient, then following him.

The musty smell got super intense as the door to the doctor’s office closed behind them, and Hunk tried to hold his breath as they walked past the growths and into another black-painted corridor. This time, the distant, faint light looked greenish -- a sickly, wan color. Once he was sure they were past the danger zone, he put a hand on the wall again to guide himself more surely through the near-darkness.

“That guy was really good,” he commented over the beat of their feet on the ground. “Didn’t you think? The pus in his eye socket looked real.”

He heard a noise from just ahead that might have been a sound of agreement, or a sound of retching. He wasn’t quite sure. Tentatively, he said, “Hey, Lance? You OK?”

“Yeah. Just fine.”

He didn’t sound just fine. He sounded like he might throw up. “Well, let’s pick up the pace a little,” Hunk said as the green light started to get bright enough to sort of see by.

“I said I’m fine.” But there wasn’t much conviction in it. Hunk was about to insist when a new sound cut the quiet.

The raspy sound of something pointed being dragged against a wall.

In the dimness and the twists and turns, the sound could have come from anywhere. Ahead. Behind. Hunk peered over his shoulder into the darkness. He saw exactly as much nothing as he feared he would. Now that there weren’t cool effects to focus on, the old misgivings were coming back in force.

_kssssssssss_

He pressed to the right side of the hall, and ahead of him could hear a sudden thump as Lance presumably did the same.

The dragging sound? It was coming from behind the left-hand wall. A wall that, judging by the sound’s nearness, couldn’t be more than a half inch thick.

“Hey… uh, Lance?”

“Yeah?”

“You heard that too, right?”

There was a pause. Then, “I didn’t hear anything. Clearly, there’s nothing at all haunted in this hall, so we should stop wasting our time and get through it as quickly as possible.”

Well, it was good to hear the bravado in Lance’s voice, however false. That bravado had given Hunk courage when he didn’t have enough of his own before. So he just said, “Yeah. Sounds good,” and they walked on.

The scratching followed them.

It hissed along the wall, just out of sight. Hunk listened to it as it dragged war up near the ceiling then down roughly to knee high - just about as long as that doctor’s arms had been, right? But they left that behind. But of course, in Geslorp’s House of Terrors, who knew what sorts of walkways and hidden passages could be built into the wall. Maybe the actor had decided to take a personal interest in frightening them… oh no. Was this his fault? He hadn’t acted properly intimidated by the scene, he’d been too interested in how they did the gurney effect. Had he insulted the doctor enough to make it come after them? He’d been the one warning Lance that maybe normal was different in this place, but he hadn’t even thought...

Shaking his head, he hurried a little bit more.

The corridor came to a final turning and opened out into what looked like a wet, slimy cave. Pools of viscous green goo here and there cast the sickly glow that was illuminating the space. The ground looked like it was formed from a series of rounded stones with ridged tops that put Hunk in mind of little brains. Everything was covered in a glistening sheen of wetness.

As the pair of them walked right up to where the stones started, a voice boomed out from all around them, “So you wanted to see more of my works? I cannot blame you. The confluence of life and death is _fascinating_. This creature was dead, once upon a time, but now look… it has come back to life! Or some semblance.” A laugh danced on the air. “I have been curious how potent the stomach acid would be after its… reanimation. I am so glad you are going to test it for me.”

Lance and Hunk exchanged looks.

“They… they wouldn’t use _real_ acid,” Lance said in hushed tones.

“Uh, how sure are you about that?” Hunk asked, eyeing one of the green pools. As he watched, a large bubble fought its way slowly to the top and popped, leaving a mark on the surface for a few seconds before it smoothed over again. It certainly _smelled_ acidic.His mind was transporting him back uneasily to the inside of the weblum.

“Less sure than I was before we came in?” Lance said.

Hunk peered across the room. “At least this time we can see the exit.”

“Small favors. If our shoes start to burn we run for it?”

“Sounds good.”

The two brave paladins of Voltron stepped gingerly out into the next room of Geslorp’s House of Terrors in unison.

The moment Hunk put pressure on the first of those rounded stones, he knew this was not going to go well. The rocks felt slick and slippery beneath him, which would have been bad enough on its own … but it wasn’t on its own. As he stepped down, the rock itself sank beneath him. He hurriedly stepped forward with the other foot before he lost his balance, only to have the next one he tried sink easier and faster. Arms windmilling, he managed to keep himself upright for the moment.

“I have to give them,” Lance muttered from Hunk’s left. He was managing a little better, though his progress was still unsteady. “This actually does feel like walking across a stomach. Gross.”

Resisting the urge to say he HAD walked across a stomach and it had been FAR more stable than this, Hunk gritted his teeth and forged ahead. He had to admit though, it was certainly an unsettling experience, especially with the humidity and that cloying smell on the air.

He avoided the pools of liquid. Just in case.

The doorway on the far side led to another dark hallway, and the two paladins moved into it uneasily. At least it was wider, making walking side-by-side an easier prospect.

They weren’t five steps in before the scraping started again, once more just on the other side of the wall. The hallway turned and twisted until Hunk felt reasonably sure that it should have crossed back over itself several times, but it just kept going. At some point the scraping began to become punctuated with loud BANGs, as something threw itself at the wall. Even a mantra of “it’s not real” wasn’t helping anymore -- especially not when even the floor underfoot began to tremble and rumble, as though something were trying to burst through it .

They came at last to another wider room, this one barely illuminated with a murky silver light. The space was about fifteen feet square, and each wall was segmented into thirds horizontally and halves vertically. The faint light drew the indents between the sections in faint gray while leaving each panel the same endless-void-black as before. Was there something in the paint they used that made it absolutely swallow the light?

Lance had crossed the room, and now knocked on one of the panels. “Great, now how do we get out of here?” he asked, his voice trying to sound light but landing somewhere more in the vicinity of hysterical. “I don’t see a door and -- woah.”

Hunk blinked as Lance drew back from the second panel he’d tried to knock on… except that his hand had gone straight through. Some of those void-looking panels were actually voids? Lance tried the panel below the missing one, but it remained solid. Not the way out then.

Hunk tried another wall, the one to the right of the way they’d come in. All three of the top panels there were solid, but in one of the bottom ones, his hand pressed right through where he expected to meet resistance. The air was slightly cooler on the other side. Hunk drew back quickly. He’d felt an uneasy crawl across his skin, as though he were sticking his hand into a wild animal’s den.

“So. Have you reconsidered my offer?”

The voice once more came from all around them. Hunk turned to the middle of the room, stepping subtly away from that empty panel. Lance moved next to him, the two of them unconsciously huddling closer together as slight scraping and knocking sounds came from all around -- now to their left, now seemingly in the entrance, now coming from the place Lance had found the first empty spot. Both paladins’ heads turned, following the noise on its irregular journey.

“It’s important to have… variety in your work. Learning how you two work would do nicely.”

To punctuate this, their hidden tormentor slammed the wall again, this time directly in front of them. Hunk let out an undignified shout and jumped what felt like halfway to the ceiling. As the moment passed, he realized there was something, a persistent, almost painful pressure on his right arm. Oh god… oh god… he turned his head slowly, afraid to look, afraid to see what it was and...

“Um… dude?”

Hunk watched as Lance’s eyes looked up and caught his gaze, then swiveled down to where he was now clinging to Hunk’s arm. He looked back up, then released Hunk as if scalded and clasped his hands behind his back

“Come on, ease up,” Hunk said with far more calm than he was feeling. “It’s not real.”

“I feel like I should be telling you that,” Lance hissed back. He began to look away, but his head stopped when it was facing the wall in front of them and stared for a moment.

The doctor’s voice broke into their conversation again, “I promise, I’ll take good care… of what’s left.”

Lance, still staring, transfixed, whispered, “Hunk, smile.”

“What?”

“It’s a haunted house.” Lance nodded his head almost imperceptibly toward wherever he was looking. Hunk saw nothing but blackness. “Like at an amusement park. And we’re near the end. Smile.”

It took a moment to get his meaning. He might not have worked it out, but finally, he saw something there, in the dark. “Huh? Oh. Oh!”

Hunk complied just as the wall in front of them erupted in an explosion of sound and motion and painfully brilliant, blinding white light.

  
___________________________________________________  


“And when we finally left the last room, we found out that there were like ten different exits,” Lance said, holding up all ten fingers for emphasis. “Someone in the exit line said each one is a different experience, and that the doctor was good, but that the one with the insects is _really_ creepy.”

“I think I was just fine with our level of creepy,” Hunk said around a mouthful ice cream.

The two of them were regaling Pidge, Coran and Shiro with a… version, Hunk supposed, of events at Geslorp’s House of Terrors while they  enjoyed a small snack.

“So were you scared?” Pidge asked, putting a teasing emphasis on the last word before licking the back of her spoon.

“What, us? Come on, It wasn’t that scary. The doctor guy was actually a little bit funny. ‘It’s important to have variety in your work.’” Lance actually did a passable impression of the voice that had followed them through the halls.

“So, do you think you’ll go back again?” Coran asked, and something in his voice suggested to Hunk that if the answer was yes, he might be coming along.

But Lance shrugged. “Eh, I dunno. Maybe someday. If they can get something a little scarier than this.” And he pulled a small black disk from his pocket and pressed the glowing spot on the side. A small 3d rendering of that final, dark room had sprung to life -- the doctor leaning seemingly out of the shadows toward Hunk and Lance, grinning and confident, in the middle of the room. They actually looked like they weren’t afraid of anything. The space version of a souvenir photo.

Of course, it wasn’t disclosing how, the moment after the final flash of light, the two of them had, in fact, screamed like babies and bolted out of the door that had materialized seemingly from thin air. Hunk just let it be.

It might not be the technical truth, but much like Geslorp’s House of Terrors itself, it made its own reality.


End file.
